Listeners remember nuances of musical performance, research suggests

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When we hear a piece of music, our
memories record not just the melody that makes up its musical
structure. We also remember subtle features like intensity and
duration of individual notes, say researchers at the Ohio State
University. This ability appears as early as 10 months of age,
according to a new study by the researchers.

These features are what make two musicians sound different
when they are playing the same music, and make two speakers
sound different when they are saying the same sentence.

Caroline Palmer, professor of
psychology at Ohio State,
found that people remember
such instance-specific acoustic
features - known as prosodic
cues - when recalling a familiar
tune. Prosodic cues in music
enable listeners to identify a
favorite performer or a familiar
voice in the same way that
characteristics of tone and
inflection help listeners
recognize individual speakers.

Palmer and her collaborators in the research - the late Peter W.
Jusczyk, a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University
and Melissa K. Jungers, a graduate student at Ohio State -
reported their findings in a recent issue of the Journal of
Memory and Language.

The researchers conducted three experiments to investigate
people's memory for music. In the first experiment, 24 musically
trained subjects and 16 subjects with no musical training were
asked to listen to two short musical sequences played on a
computer-monitored acoustic piano. The music was played over
and over again to familiarize the listeners with the sequences.

The researchers then played different performances of the same
musical sequences to listeners. The new performances were
exactly the same as the original sequences in melody and rhythm,
but they differed in nuances such as how loud and long certain
tones were.

Despite the similarity in musical structure, the listeners were able
to distinguish the changed sequences from the familiar ones. The
subjects who lacked musical training were just as discerning as
those who were musically trained.

"The finding showed that listeners were able to remember
specific instances in the performance rather than just the general
meaning or the "gist" of the music," Palmer said.

To find out if the discerning ability of the subjects was due to
their years of exposure to music in everyday life, the researchers
repeated the experiment with 16 10-month-old babies. When the
babies recognized a piece of music, they turned their heads
toward the loudspeakers. The babies turned their heads for
longer periods when they heard a performance they had been
familiarized with than when they were exposed to novel
performances. The researchers believe this indicates that they
remembered instance-specific features like the adult subjects.

"We wondered if listeners are equipped from birth with the right
perceptual and memory abilities to remember particular musical
performances and voices," Palmer said. "The answer was yes.
Ten-month-olds can perceive the different performances and
remember the ones they have heard before."

From a third experiment, Palmer and her colleagues found that
prosodic features that do not match or reinforce the overall
musical structure of a composition are the easiest to recognize
when presented in the wrong musical context.

"For example, slowing down at the end of a musical phrase is
more appropriate than slowing down in the middle of a phrase,"
Palmer said. When prosody does not fit musical structure,
Palmer said, listeners are sensitive to the mismatch between the
musical structure and the prosody.

The overall findings of the study show that people remember
music in the same way that they remember speech, in which
characteristics of tone and inflection distinguish any two
speakers. The overlap, Palmer said, could lead to a better
understanding of the complexities of human memory.

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The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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